Meet The 2014 Founders: YourPlace, Where The Loyal Customer is King

/in , /by
Mark Okhman, Founder/CEO YourPlace

Mark Okhman, Founder/CEO YourPlace

We continue our round of interviews with the 2014 Founders from StartupYard. Meet YourPlace, a young team from Kazakhstan working on a location-based customer acquisition and loyalty platform for bars, cafes, and restaurants. I sat down with founder and CEO Mark Okhman.

Mark, tell us about YourPlace in a few words.

YourPlace allows restaurants, cafes, or bars, to target customers, and keep them aware of bonuses or loyalty rewards from their favorite places. At the end of the day, it helps them to answer a simple question: “Where to go?”

YourPlace is a web platform and mobile app that uses analytics to build long lasting loyal relationships between venues, and their customers. logo (1)

What makes this app different from familiar platforms like Yelp, or Groupon, or the Czech service Slevomat?  

To visualise our relationship to those players, I would say that we are at the intersection of Yelp and Groupon. YourPlace knows which places you, as a user, like. We’ve taken the following facts as given: when you’re loyal as a customer, you’re treated with love, and loyal customers spend more, and come more often. This is what YourPlace is all about.

We don’t allow reviews, but we learn customer purchasing behavior. For now, about 10 places are testing YourPlace’s features for merchants, which allow them to target different groups of their customers, track and digest results of loyalty campaigns, to grow loyal customers base.

Your team is the youngest at StartupYard. Most of you are still in University. Do you think your age is a barrier to making YourPlace a success?

Sometimes it feels like we are even too late. :laughs: Our university did a lot to give us an environment where we could achieve what we have now. We’ve learned a lot, we’ve met new people, exchanged experiences and through this we’ve grown. I very often hear the phrase: ‘your age is dependent on what you’ve learned, not on how many birth days you’ve celebrated.’ We have big aims: to help build relationships between merchants and their customers.

And your team also happens to be the only one from outside Europe. What advantages and disadvantages come with growing a new online business in Kazakhstan?  

There is a big niche to grow ,and people in Central Asia are open to new things in online and mobile. Penetration of the mobile internet is now high enough to grow whole new businesses. A few years ago, as in Europe, our market experienced a boom in coupon services. It was an interesting time! People were inspired, while places were waiting for the influx of customers, which, actually, didn’t happen. As one of significant consequences – merchants lost their profit margin because of high discounts and customer flow when they stopped this “ coupon madness”.

Our company today helps such businesses as restaurants, bars or cafes, to make discounts and give bonuses without losses in customer flow. I want to emphasize that this market in Kazakhstan is not small – about 4000 food-merchants in two biggest cities (Almaty – 3 mln, Astana – 800 000) Loyalty management systems are the next logical level, after coupon services. In fact, the Kazakhstani market barely uses Passbook in customer-merchants relationships, while we teach people to use this easy and efficient technology in their daily life.

In a few months we will enable our system to work with iBeacons, which will cover off-line customer-merchant relations. There is so much to discover and implement! We feel like we are helping our web environment to be more qualitative. One of our goals is to make life easier and more interesting for people in Central Asia. We can do this!

Let’s talk about the app itself. What have been some of your major challenges in making the platform work? What issues do you still need to resolve?  

You will not believe me if I tell you that YourPlace was first called MOSKIS, and it was nothing more than a search engine for places of any kind around you. Typical copy of Foursquare-like apps. After some time, we transformed it into a discount club, also called MOSKIS (the Russian equivalent of this abbreviature means “mobile discounts”). Now we are doing our best on the merchant side to attract the right people with interesting offers and continue doing this until they will become really loyal customers.We are a channel for building relationships.

On the tech side, we had some problems while preparing the platform for high loads. That was difficult, because we’ve never had to deal with it before. And again we are on the short list – we run YourPlace on high quality Amazon services, which is, in fact, the industry leading cloud service.

How do you plan to market YourPlace? What kind of market strategy do you think will bring you growth in the near term?  

First of all, we want to build a society of customers relevant to merchants. We are doing this through attracting people at the point of sale. Restaurants and bars want to know more about their visitors, so they help us with this. We also plan to attract people through activities around merchants who work with us. For this we will use our blog and creative team, who will put on events and provide interesting reading material. This is how we want to attract people to go to those restaurants or cafes, showing how interesting this experience could be. We use localization as a key for maintaining the relevance of people inside of the platform to our client merchants.

The YourPlace App in action

The YourPlace App in action

Does your team plan to stay in Europe to develop YourPlace, or will you focus on your home market?

In the immediate future, we plan to go to Central Asia, especially to Kazakhstan, our home market. And it is a big market. As the product becomes tested and validated, we plan to grow to Central and Eastern Europe. We plan on that growth by around 2015.

How has your experience been here at StartupYard? Which of the mentors had the biggest impact on your personal and company development, and which parts of the program came the hardest for you and the team?

It has been amazing. 24/7 working on your project in the environment ever. And I’m not exaggerating! Our network grew incredibly. We learn something new every day and that’s what pushes us to work more; to be more efficient.

All three of us [Founders] had mentors that were our personal favorites. I was inspired by Damian Brhel [a StartupYard alum and Founder of Brand Embassy], even though the other mentors have imparted an incalculable amount of knowledge. Rauan loved mentoring with Zdenek Cendra [founder of cdn77.com], while Alibek liked Michal Illich [Founder of Wikidi and formerly of Seznam], because of his pragmatic vision.

[ssba]

Meet the 2014 Founders: Gjirafa, Albania/Kosovo’s answer to Google

/in , , , , , /by
In our continuing series, we are introducing the StartupYard 2014 teams in individual interviews with their founders and key members at the accelerator. Here we introduce Gjirafa, in the words of CEO and Founder Mergim Cahani, of Kosovo. 

 

Mergim, how would you describe Gjirafa in a few words?

It’s an awesome animal with a long neck :laughs:.

Gjirafa is a full-text web search engine and a news aggregator specialized in the Albanian language. Gjirafa will bring relevant information that will be easy accessible to over 12 million Albanian speaking people worldwide.

So it’s Google For Albanian Speakers. Isn’t That Job Already Taken (by Google)?

You could say the same thing about Seznam or Yandex (the Russian search giant), but they’ve thrived in competition with Google. That’s a great model for us moving forward.  Competition between Seznam and Google have brought better results for consumers in the Czech Republic. Google doesn’t own the internet, and it shouldn’t.

And no, we aren’t Google. We have something that Google does not have. Gjirafa has access to local data, understands the market, and has been developing technology for full-text search in Albanian language. That’s something no one else has ever done, including Google.

Albanian stands alone as a language with no relatives.

Albanian stands alone as a language with no relatives.

Gjirafa is turning quite a few heads with our mentors at StartupYard. Why do you think that is?

Our team is built to impress, with a very strong business and academic background. Three founders have a combined 30+ years of experience, one previous successful startup, four masters degrees and one PhD. The advisory board features prominent figures in web search and management, Prof. Torsten Suel and Prof. Jay Nathan respectively.

We are very happy to be getting so much positive attention, but important to note is that mentors’ inputs and constructive feedback is shaping our product and company further. From day one at StartupYard our value proposition started to get better and better thanks to mentors’ feedback. The reason why most mentors and investors are interested, we think, is that our project has the prerequisites to make it promising: a strong team, an excellent market potential, and the technology – specifically our differentiating product features.

Mergim Cahani: Founder and CEO of Gjirafa

Mergim Cahani: Founder and CEO of Gjirafa

What brought you to StartupYard? What have been the benefits for you, so far?

I am certain that StartupYard is de facto the best accelerator that our team and project could have picked. In fact it is the only accelerator that we wanted to be part of (within the context of this project). It has just about all the ingredients of other accelerators, including the ones from Silicon Valley, and then some – that directly gives us better opportunities and increases our chances of success.

Mentors, investors, angels and VC’s, involved with StartupYard can more easily comprehend the potential of our project at our targeted market than other investors from other geographic areas. There are great similar success stories in the Czech Republic, and some of these investors are involved directly in those projects (www.seznam.cz is one example). They understand our product, they recognize its potential, and have a clear idea what it takes to reach our goal. This way, they can provide feedback that is so vital to company success, and some have already shown interest to be part of this journey.

Where to start with benefits of StartupYard :laughs: We love Prague, StartupYard at TechSquare has an amazing working environment, great people, a lot of events, and, can’t forget,  great Czech beer. As far as accelerating our project growth, we have meet some industry leaders, Chairpersons, CEOs, and investors from world leading corporations, who really helped shape our product and increase our value proposition immensely. Also there are a lot of perks, to mentioned one: we are en route to becoming a BizSpark plus company (that is around $60,000 in azure credit that we were planning to spend). Last but not least, people who run StartupYard know their business- they have a proven track record and experience that was evident from day one.

left: Cedric Maloux, Director Startup Yard. Right: Mergim Cahani, Founder CEO, Gjirafa

left: Cedric Maloux, Director Startup Yard. Right: Mergim Cahani, Founder CEO, Gjirafa

What are your near-term goals for Gjirafa? What products and services will be part of the ecosystem at launch?

65911_222585047881671_1347153580_n

Our near-term goal is to launch within two months. We are planning to include a few “elect” services at the beginning. That means a full text search, news aggregation, a transport scheduler for Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia, weather widget, and Albanian web facts. All these services are one of a kind, as they currently do not exist anywhere. The obvious exception is text search, where Google is a player, but we think we can do a better job, as we are focused only on one language and one specific segment of the web. That’s worked for Seznam, and we think they’ve shown us the way to success against the Google Goliath.

How about your long term goals?

Our long term goal is to become the front page of the Albanian speaking web. To be synonymous with “Internet” in the Albanian mind. If you speak Albanian, when you open a browser, it will open on www.gjirafa.com. We will provide highly relevant services and ease of access to information that is geographically localized and based on the Albanian language. Gjirafa will be more than just a useful search engine, it will be everywhere for everything. I will not speak to specific services that we plan, but I can tell you that there is a full list on queue that we are prioritizing; each one of them more valuable than the next.

As a sneak peak, enabling e-commerce in Albania and Kosovo, at this moment, tops the list of our long-term goals. Replicating the platform to other Balkan peninsula countries, is also a viable option.

You’ve mentioned developing a unique search engine for the Albanian language. Can you tell us about the development process?

It was fun! :laughs: That may sound extremely nerdy, but I don’t mind. It was really fun.

Working on this from Kosovo was a different experience than the time I spent in the United States; where in my last job I worked in a typical corporate environment. Previous to that I was in Academia, and being able to work full time on a project that I loved, what can I say? It was thrilling.

I turned one bedroom of the house into an office (this startup was luxurious; no office garage)! I used a bit of my prior experience with developing large-scale full search engines, from my Masters program at NYU Poly School of Engineering, and the very valuable help of my mentor Prof. Torsten Suel, to create all the pieces needed for the Gjirafa engine; multi-threaded crawler, indexer, query processor, and a few things in between. I developed a prototype that was not the best out there, but it was good enough and I was happy with the outcome.

The biggest limitations at the beginning were hardware and bandwidth, plus latency, and occasionally an algorithmic problem that kept me up at night. Later, two friends joined me as co-founders, and now we are working on making the engine even bigger and better. One co-founder Ercan Canhasi, PhD, is working on the search engine, while the other co-founder, Diogjen Elshani, MS, is working on the business development side.

Why do you think competitors like Google haven’t focused on Albanian speakers,

Google hasn’t ignored the market completely. I think they’ll regret their absence.

The scalability of Google allows it to fit almost any market given enough data. But there are two problems here (1) currently there is not enough data for the Albanian language on the web, and (2) the Albanian language is one of the most lexically unique language in the world. Google can’t search something it doesn’t have; it can’t index information that currently does not exists on the web. As far as the language goes, Albanian is one of the a few languages that does not derive from another language; it is a branch on its own. Processing a language (intelligently), means some knowledge is needed for that language. Linguistic research in English, and for a lot of other languages, exists. There is almost no linguistic research for Albanian that applies in this context. We are currently researching and developing Albanian grammar and syntax for NLP.  We have done the groundbreaking work that will tie Albanian speakers together online, through their language.

Kosovo’s political situation has undoubtedly held back business development in the region. Do you see the situation as improved enough for the region to compete on a level with the rest of Europe?

It is true that the political situation in the region has set back development. But things have started to take a turn, and Kosovo and Albania are becoming emerging markets especially in technology development. Based on our web mining data, the Albanian web is still in the early stages of development, but it has doubled in the past year and it is continuing its growth rapidly. That might sound like not much, considering that the whole size of the web increases at the same rate, but the difference is that the Albanian web has been expanding its core economic value at a much greater rate than the average. It is developing, and that means there are enormous positive gains to be made across a huge range. The rest of Europe will not see its web experience improves by 200% in the next 2 years. Albania and Kosovo will see that kind of improvement.  This web infancy is one of the reasons why the market is not penetrated by global companies, which makes it a logical reason why our project represents a great opportunity right now.

unnamed

What’s your general strategy for marketing Gjirafa? Google has name recognition in search all over Europe. How can you compete with that position?

Our position is with the unique services that we provide for users that Google, and other competition, do not. People need information, and currently can not get it online, and we feel that this market has been left behind – but they will be able to find it on www.gjirafa.com. Also, we will provide a targeted platform for merchants that will enable them to reach their customers. That aspect of the online economy is completely absent in Albania/Kosovo. Can you imagine that? It’s 1999 in online advertising there. Imagine what that means for the future. Our marketing strategy is diverse and a combination of several channels. Without going into specifics, we have a few marketing strategies planned for direct and indirect marketing.

 

Gjirafa is planning to launch its full text search engine in July of this year. 
You can connect with Mergim via Linkedin. 

[ssba]

Meet the 2014 Founders: Famely

/in , /by
Over the coming weeks, we will be introducing the StartupYard 2014 teams in individual interviews with their founders and key members at the accelerator. We kick off this week with Famely, the news and social media aggregator that allows you to keep tabs on your favorite personalities, wherever they appear in the media. 
 

Tell me about the Famely team.

Nemec: I’m Pavel and he’s Pavel too. He’s Pavel Volek and I’m Pavel Nemec.

Volek: I’m from Prague and he’s from Brno. We met on the way to France as Erasmus students.  I studied software engineering, at Prague Technical University, and was in France for 18 months on Erasmus. We got to know each other on the trip, and stayed in contact. The idea for Famely came about 2 years after we met.

Nemec: I studied in Brno (computer science at Masarykovo University). We’ve both suspended our studies to be here at StartupYard. I’m doing a PHD, and Pavel is finishing his masters. But we’re happy to be here now.

20140513_095556

Pavel Nemec and Pavel Volek. Co-founders of FamelyApp.com

How did you come up with the idea for Famely? Was it based on an interest you had in celebrity news and gossip?

Nemec: No, neither of us is actually too much into gossip exactly. It was just that as a student, I met so many many interesting people, well known public figures, startupers for example, that I got a chance to meet. When you meet someone really fascinating, you want to read what they have written, but also see if they do something else that’s cool and new. Clever people constantly generate new opinions, and I wanted to keep tabs on them. I searched blogs, youtube, facebook, and collected the information constantly, but you can never keep up.

Volek: When he told me about the idea, we realized we could find broader applications like sports, which I’m interested in. I’m a big fan of Real Madrid, and they have an app. But the players also have their own Twitter accounts, and they appear in places the “official” app doesn’t cover.  And there are sports aggregators, team apps, etc, but if you like multiple teams or different players, you want to control the info that you get. You can’t do that with any existing app.

Last year, Parov Stelar, one of my favorite musicians, had a concert in Prague. I found out two days after he was here. I think that happens to most of us at one time or another. If I had been checking his Twitter feed, I might have known about that. There are a lot of small clubs in Prague that really famous people do shows in, and nobody hears about it. You can’t keep up with all the ways that artists communicate with fans.

Famely_Logo-Bg-2014-01

But this is more than just an events app, isn’t it?

Nemec: Yes. A friend of mine reads gossip magazines and such. I mentioned the potential for a product like this, and they reacted strongly. We realized it could be about more than just events. The definite change came from the mentors [at StartupYard]. We knew before coming here that it was an aggregator for celebrities, but we hadn’t yet decided what market to target. We wanted to be more general. The mentors convinced us to focus on a smaller market. Celebrity gossip is a good place to start. There’s a lot of material out there, and a larger base of users. We can use this initial feature set as a way to hone the app.

How does Famely fit into the landscape of Twitter, Facebook, and other news aggregators?

Nemec: Aggregators are about aggregating your interests, but not the profiles of specific people. That’s what makes us unique.

Volek: You don’t need to learn how to use all these different platforms to find all the info you’re looking for with us. Our app is one way: focused on content.

How are you planning to monetize the app?

Nemec: The core will be about affiliate marketing. Tickets, apparell, this kind of thing. Our target market spends a lot on entertainment and clothing. We are also exploring freemium models, but that needs a lot more testing. It’s hard to say if a user would be willing to pay for more celebrity content, or for a larger library of celebrities, or what exactly. You have to be careful in considering any kind of paywall.

Volek: We are also considering magazine partnerships. We want to integrate affiliate ads, and not break the design of the app in incorporating targeted advertising. Relevant ads are important to us. We think the next generation of users wants ads that are highly relevant to them, and to the content they are looking for. Too many ads are great for advertisers, but they’re not what people really enjoy seeing. But Famely offers a tailored content experience, and that means the opportunity to target ads in very pleasing ways.

What is your strategy for promotion?

Nemec: We’d like to approach individual celebrities, particularly those that need a prepackaged solution for promoting their own content and news. That is, those without their own apps already in the Apple store, or Google Play Store.

The app will launch with pre-selected celebrities and feeds to allow us to start with great quality. We’ll start with just a few, so we can really dial in the product, and deliver consistently relevant content to our users. A great experience, exactly what fans are looking for, has to be there from launch day, or people won’t keep coming back.

What do you see as your core user group, and your main competitor?

Nemec: Our core users are “real fans.” We see our initial appeal being with english speaking young girls, who are fans of actors and musicians, but also sports fans. Celebrities try to cover all social networks and core fans at the same time do not want to miss a thing about their favourites. The point is, since there is no longer only one social network on the market, it is harder and harder to keep up. When we spoke to some fans of famous musicians, they really checking all sources they know repeatedly over and over again to not miss a thing. Also when their favourite celebrity gives an interview for an online magazine which they don’t read because they read the different one, they simply miss it. Well, no longer with Famely.

Volek: There’s no direct competitor. The market is very fragmented.

Nemec: Yeah. There is Flipboard, who are the biggest in this market, and then there’s Facebook paper, who are doing something related. But they both focus on topics and news sources, instead of people. You can create a Famely-like experience on Flipboard, but it’s not made for that. Facebook was also not designed to connect fans with diverse news sources- only with fan pages, so we see a big opening.

Volek: We want to offer credibility and quality content channels you can trust, but go outside of the “official” newsfeeds and twitter accounts, to get other perspectives on famous personalities. That’s what people really want, we think.

 

Famely_APP_2014-05

Let’s talk about StartupYard. How has your experience been with the accelerator?

Volek: It has been exciting. We’ve met a lot of interesting people. I’d like to follow some of them on Famely!

Nemec: Having a core focus of Data and Analytics brought together teams that really have a lot in common.

Volek: Yeah. Mergim (Cahani, from Gjirafa) has advised on open source libraries and data analysis tips for us. We haven’t swapped  code, but the general advice is very valuable. Having teams around you who are experiencing the same challenges is much better than going it alone all the time.

Who have been your most interesting/challenging mentors? Who has taught you the most?

Volek: The advisors come from vastly different fields. For technology, Jaroslav Gergic, a VP at GoodData, advised us on cloud technology, and how to deal with massive numbers of users so we don’t break the servers. He was a huge help. We’ve still broken the servers though :laughs:. But that wasn’t his fault.

Nemec: Advisors have been very helpful. Mentorship here has really meant more commitment than we expected. David Booth (CEO of 2nd Degree Leads), for example, gave us incredible advice when he was here, but then followed up after few days to give us more interesting tips. They kept thinking about us after the mentoring sessions.

It’s also great to meet with investors and see how they think about their potential investments. That’s the experience we had with Andrej Kiska from Credo Ventures. They’ve explained precisely how they validate products on the market, using equations for spreading of the “epidemic [of users].” We’ve found these new directions in thinking to be really helpful.

Register for Updates on Famely at FamelyApp.com

[ssba]

Michal Illich: “Know your Competition.”

/in , , , /by
Michal Illich is a household name in the Czech Republic’s technology industry. Aside from developing the engine that originally powered Seznam, the king of search in the region, Illich has founded a raft of companies in the past 15 years. He’s a founder of StartupYard, as well as of Techsquare, the open tech workspace where StartupYard is based. He’s been mentoring our current startups, and we got him to weigh in on the state of the Czech Republic’s tech industry, and what it’s like to mentor new founders.
 
Michal, first things first: we hear you have a Tesla. Were you the first Tesla owner in Prague? How do you like it?

As far as I know, a few (up to 5) owners received their Tesla in the same week as I did. I might be the first because I opted for the earliest possible date. It’s a great car – beautiful, very powerful (4.2 seconds to 100 km/h) and still practical (5 seats, 2 trunks).

You’re one of the founders of TechSquare (homebase for StartupYard), and a founder and investor in StartupYard itself. What got you interested in bringing new startups to Prague?
Well, as I’m one the first generation of Czech people who made some money from their internet projects, I thought it’ll be nice to give something back.
Czech and Central European investors are known for being conservative. Do you think that’s true, and if so, what unique challenges does that present startups here?
I’m not really sure if we are conservative. Most investors I know are realistic or optimistic about Czech startups. I don’t think that the american way of throwing a lot of money into startups and hoping that 1% will became a billion dollar company would work here. We are slower but longterm results of Czech IT companies are quite solid.
You’ve been mentoring the teams at StartupYard since the beginning. What do you find difficult about mentoring at this stage in these companies’ development? What about it is rewarding for you?
As Niels Bohr said, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future. No one – even the best mentors – can predict the success of any particular startup. So we search and discuss it together which is interesting for the startup and for me as well.
Is there an area of preparation that the majority of accelerator teams could do better in?
Probably knowing their competitors and alternatives.
What are some projects you’ve been excited about recently? What are you working on?
Almost all the startups in the current batch are nice. We’re working on http://flowreader.com/ , http://testomato.com/ , http://kinohled.cz/ , some machine learning problems and one as yet unlaunched project.
How has the Tech Startup landscape changed in the past 10 years in the Czech Republic? What do you see coming in the future?
From the czech websites, only Seznam.cz is innovating. The other major players did nothing technologically worth mentioning for several years :(.  The global startups operated by czech people are more interesting and I think we’ll have more billion dollar companies (to accompany Seznam.cz, GoodData, AVG and Avast) in the next few years.
[ssba]

Daniel Hastik of Futurelytics: “Be Free to Make Mistakes”

/in , /by

Daniel Hastik, a StartupYard mentor who will be working with our Spring 2014 teams, is a serial entrepreneur and globetrotter. When he’s not tending to one of the first Czech based hosting companies from his home in Melbourne Australia, he’s founding new companies with the help of Seedcamp and Credo Ventures. And he manages it all remotely. Quite a feat, so we caught up with Daniel last week to ask him how he manages it all.

Read more about Futureleytics on their blog, and a bit more about Daniel at hrkavarna.cz (article in Czech). 
 
futurelyticsloNEW
Daniel, you launched Futurelytics in 2012 through Seedcamp. Can you share a bit of your founding story with us?
The co-founders know each other from university times; we have crossed in our professional lives multiple times in various IT companies across Europe. We’ve worked together in a consultancy for retail in Czech and also as advanced analytics consultants for a Nordic company. I’ve also been managing my own company over time as one of the first web hosting businesses in The Czech Republic, and had trouble recognizing patterns in my client base (thousands of clients) and Mirek helped me to find my most promising ones and get a rid of those that just consumed support hours. We thought that might be a good product and Jan, our colleague, has helped us to foster the models and we started to realize that we could really build something out of it. We applied to Seedcamp with this idea and were chosen from among approx. 800 other companies. From that time on our lives changed.
IMG_4854 (1)
You’re currently based in Melbourne, but your team is in Ostrava (Czech Republic), how do you manage that kind of responsibility remotely? 
We are building Futurelytics as a global company from day one. I’ve been on the move for the last 18 years and have travelled across the world multiple times. We believe that we have the right passionate people, self-motivated and responsible in what they do. We do not over-control, and everyone is taking their own responsibility in their actions. Freedom of choice is very important for us. Some people want to work on Sundays, some during the mornings .. there’s creativity in what we do and that doesn’t come with control. This way, we can have a distributed team. I’m responsible for business, and Mirek is product centric. We are really complementary in our day-to-day tasks and we move fast. Of course we are making heavy use of various online tools like Gmail, Hangouts, Trello, Harvest …
You’ve attracted some great investors, including our own partner Credo Ventures with Ondrej Bartos. What’s been your strategy for attracting investors, and what advice would newly-minted founders most profit from, when it comes to talking to VCs and Angels for the first time? 
Any startup that wants to impress great VC investors needs to be proven and/or backed by a previous Angel-type investor, an incubator or another trustable entity (apart from a great product and scalable markets). We are proud to be a part of the Seedcamp family in that sense.
The very first investors value the founders’ attitude, the team & their vision. By default we are different. At the very beginning we didn’t even know anything about startup buzz. Investors should see that you possibly have what it takes to be a great entrepreneur. Not being afraid to fall, working on your skills, networking and being open-minded are the prerequisites of an entrepreneur. That way you can execute any idea you could have.
Futurelytics helps companies to work better with their existing customers. What are some of the ways you do that? What are some of the biggest mistakes most companies are making when it comes to working with their customer base and managing their customer data? 
We let them discover new revenue potentials from various customer segments. So called “second-best” customers seem to be the most appealing information for marketers. Driving marketing campaigns by real behavior of customers inevitably brings their increased efficiency. Starting by lowering CPC, monetizing loyal customers and not ending by customer-churn mitigation we improve the customer lifetime value from several perspectives. Putting all these contributions together brings each engaged business a significant improvement.
tumblr_inline_n32c562PSI1rgmdoi
What do you think are the biggest areas of near-term growth for “big data” and analytics applications? What areas of the market are really interesting to you right now? 
There are technologies in place like Hadoop or Google BigQuery that handle tremendous data volumes in real-time. The real challenge seems to be to get some new information out of patterns and consequences in the data and put them in line with business specifics. We go beyond that thinking and bring-up specific recommendations for marketing campaigns on customer segments recognized. This is called “prescriptive-analytics”. We are eager to be pioneering in this area and closely cooperate on that e.g. with Gartner or Google.
You’ve had a varied career, from studies in Portugal to work in Africa, New Zealand, Australia, the US, as well as back home in the Czech Republic. You’ve founded 3 companies, and you keep on coming up with new ideas. What specific things have you learned through these experiences that you plan to share with our latest crop of startups at StartupYard?
I wouldn’t call it a career. There’s no certain strict lined path in front of me. I follow my passion “to create” and that comes from the freedom to make mistakes. And I’m not afraid to do so again and again. If you are not afraid to learn something new, not to be constrained by the past, to admit that you “don’t know” and ask for help, then the world is yours. You can train your instincts and quickly spot opportunities where other people see only issues and problems. You stay ahead the crowd and lead the way.
[ssba]

StartupYard Mentor Bogomil Shopov Talks “Growth Hacking” and Open Source

/in , , , /by
Bogomil Shopov is a well known open-source developer and renowned growth hacker. He is an active speaker in open-source circles, and a contributor to various projects, including Firefox.
 
Follow him on Twitter @bogomep for valuable updates on the world of Bogo.

WIll you tell us a little bit about your career?

I started my career a long time ago. My first job was, behold … a sheppard! I was at school and I needed money. Believe it or not I have learned a lot from my first job 🙂

After that I used to sell small goods, and when I finished high school I joined the Bulgarian Army.  I spent 5 years in intelligence doing some secret military stuff. After 5 years I realized I needed a change and in order to escape the army’s stupidity, I decided to pursue my dream – to work in IT. If you go through my resume you will find a lot of things – I used to work as a programmer, web architect, IT manager, Product and Project Manager, Open Source consultant, community manager, marketeer. I’ve spend the last 6 years working on startups.  Now I am a “growth hacker” – the only definition that combines all skills I’ve gathered in my entire career … and I am happy! Also I am a Pirate! My signature is on the establishment act of Pirate Parties International.

Bogomil Shopov: Avowed Pirate.

Bogomil Shopov: Avowed Pirate.

You’re interested in open source, and you work part time on Mozilla’s Firefox. What drew you to that project, and open source work in general?

That’s an easy one. I like freedom and I like sharing. At first I started to share my code with other people and then I started to show others how and why to do it. The open source and free software movements are “guilty” of some of the most successful software projects, including the Internet. I contribute also to the Open Data initiative for  opening all government data to the public. Talking about freedom, I even ran for European parliament with the idea to fight for our digital rights and I am proud that I helped the stopping of Sarkozy’s “three strikes” (the EU version of the law). Also I am mentioned in Wikileaks for that. As I said before I like freedom and sharing.

Why did you campaign for MP fall short?

People in Bulgaria were not ready to think deeper about digital rights and green way of living. Those concepts were new to them and that’s why we got so low results.

Ever think of running again?

No, because I think there is a way to do useful work outside of the parliament and to achieve my goals.

256735_10150216207418864_4895877_o

You describe yourself as a “growth hacker.” What does growth hacking mean to you in today’s terms?

It seems there are a lot definitions of the term. I personally prefer this one: A growth hacker is a rare combination: someone with the right marketing and technical skills who can come up with clever marketing hacks and also track their results.

[This is the main topic of Bogomil’s upcoming StartupYard workshop for members of the accelerator]

You’ve been working for a couple of years in education technology. What are some of the unique challenges and opportunities in that field?

The Internet is an open book – you can take whatever you want, but you can also write and contribute. Using the internet for teaching and studying – it’s more than required now. There is huge knowledge collected and if you are a smart teacher you will know how to use it. The challenge is, well, to convince the rest of the teachers that using modern educational technologies is a must.

We worked together as a marketing team for a year, and one of your strengths is email marketing. Is email marketing more or less relevant today than before the rise of social media?

Email marketing never dies. This is the most used channel and it will remain like that for years to come for sure. If you are using it wisely you can get a lot from it. I know a company that used to send millions of e-mails almost every week, without any effect and after changing the strategy with more precise segmentation, A/B/C/D testing and adopting some anti-spam techniques the miracle happened – it works.

Email marketing is not just pushing the “Send” button. I’d love to write a blog post to share more thoughts on that, because is one of my favourite things to talk about.

What about social media? What are some of the common mistakes that people tend to make when trying to leverage social media channels into growth?

I love social media. I love creating experiments on social media as well (do not google me!).

The biggest mistake that most of the companies do is to do everything they can to get more followers. What? Yes! I know a lot of companies, even here in the Czech Republic, whose goal for their social media effort is to have new followers every day and to have more than others.

Well this is not so bad, but this is just step 0 – the work begins after that. You have to talk with your followers, you have to keep them entertained and engaged and you have to give them something they need, not just boring sales messages.

The social media channel is like every other channel – if you use it the smart way – you will get a lot from it.

What can StartupYard teams expect to learn from your input, and what do you hope to gain from mentoring  StartupYard startups?

I will hold a workshop in April about, well, growth hacking. I will show the startups how they can use tools and ideas to find their first clients, how to nurture them, so they can buy again. How to do testing for their ideas and concepts, how to track everything and how to use the data to take business decisions.

Also I will show some growth hacking examples, that they can start using on the next day. Also I will spend some time talking about Behavioral Economics from the Marketing Point of View.

But most of the time there will be discussion, because I don’t believe in workshops where one man does all the talking and the rest of the audience is thinking about something else. We will talk together and grow together.

You can catch Bogo at the Bulgaria Web Summit 2014, and at his upcoming Growth Hacking workshop

[ssba]

Ondrej Bartos on Talking to VCs: “Focus on Problems”

/in , /by

This week, StartupYard investor and VC, Ondrej Bartos, of Credo Ventures answered some of my questions on venture capital investing, and dealing with early stage startups. Ondrej has recently been cited as one of the top European investors in technology by Nibletz.com, and is a mentor at Startupyard. Here’s what he had to say.

bartos
 Hi Ondrej, can you tell us a bit about how you got involved with Startupyard?
I first got involved as a mentor back when Lukas and Petr founded SY in 2011, and after the first year we decided as Credo Ventures to become an investor and shareholder, as we felt that SY was very well-positioned to support the startup ecosystem in Central Europe which is something we as a venture firm very much hope for and is crucial for our business. So in 2012 we became a very active investor, we supported SY to get into GAN, to extend its mentor group, and to get funding for the following classes. And it’s been great fun as well as inspiration working with both the SY team and the accelerated startups.

You’ve been a VC for a long time. Can you talk a bit about your career, and how the field has changed during your tenure?

Hey, it hasn’t been such a long time… 🙂 I actually first started as a small angel investor, then I worked for a Polish VC MCI Management, but I only co-founded Credo in 2009 – and that’s what I consider the real start of my VC career. I did make some nice venture deals in my MCI days, like Geewa for which we then hired Cedric as a CEO [Cedric Maloux is now CEO of Startupyard] or Nostromo which was a terrible failure due to Mr. Jobs’ genius move with the iPhone. I made successful investments like Retail Info (sold to Mafra) or Invia.cz (which still is the largest online travel commerce player in Central Europe). But only with Credo I really started focusing on what my passion is: seeking and backing the future global stars, the innovators and disruptors who aim to create from scratch something which can change people’s lives.
In the world of startups, I think 5 years may seem like a very long time to some people. Are you settled into this new role, or do you dream of even bigger things? 
Stay hungry, of course I dream. I dream of Credo fund 2 and 3 and 4… I dream of another billion-dollar-company from Central Europe, backed by Credo. I dream of a Czech startup solving world’s poverty or schizophrenia.

What about Credo Ventures (your VC firm)? Why did you decide to found it, and what’s your overall mission?

As already said, my passion are entrepreneurs who aim to disrupt ways markets operate now, with the use of technology which is our main sector focus. We consider venture capital is that it’s a tool to help the smartest and most capable entrepreneurs to make their dreams happen. We are not financiers, we are backers of entrepreneurs. And we are entrepreneurs ourselves.

How has the environment in Central Europe changed for VCs in the in the past 5 years? Good changes, bad changes? How does the tech business here stack up against bigger markets?

This really depends on the point of view. You could say the environment hasn’t changed too much, we as VCs still receive only a couple of hundred projects per year, most of which are really low quality (and I’m being diplomatic here), we still have to explain what we seek in projects and what we look for in entrepreneurs, people generally still don’t understand the basics (of our business), people still don’t understand what startups are (even the ones who claim to be startups). On the other hand, comparing to the situation 5 years ago, we have a NYSE traded tech company AVG from the Czech Republic which attacks $1B market cap, we have a NASDAQ traded company LogMeIn from Hungary which attacks $1B market cap. We have another $1B security company Avast which recently announced investment from CVC Capital Partners. We saw successful exits of local startups Cognitive Security (which we happened to be an investor in) to Cisco Systems or Mdot to GoDaddy. The number of projects we saw in 2010 was a third of what we saw in 2013 (550 projects). There are a number of accelerators and incubators, foreign VCs are looking around and finally are willing to invest into Central European startups – we have coinvested with Atlas, Index, Flybridge, Baseline and other U.S.- and UK-based funds. I am very optimistic…

If you’re comfortable talking about it, what was your all-time biggest mistake as an investor, or as an entrepreneur? The more apocalyptic, the better.

The most apocalyptic one I will skip, sorry. Maybe in a couple of years…
I will say Nostromo was certainly one of them. It was a great team, great entrepreneurs, solid product and vision… if only Steve Jobs didn’t introduce iPhone and change mobile telephony forever. We made the investment at a time when analysts and researchers predicted something totally different than what actually then happened. $1M down the drain, nothing worse, no apocalypse.
 I think startupers do live in fear that Google or Apple or Facebook will introduce a small change (like an added functionality) that will dash their dreams to peaces. Whole businesses have been made obsolete by big players this way. Is that happening more, or is the playing field just getting wider for new ideas? Can you tell us a little more about Nostromo?
Well, when you’re a startup there’s always a risk of someone huge with deep pockets and 64 billion dollars in the bank will launch a product or service which would make you irrelevant. It happens. But I wouldn’t say it happens more often. Also, startups should be carefully not to base the whole business on just a feature addable by Google or Facebook.
About Nostromo… well it was a startup in the pre-iPhone era, mobile phones were dump phones and the only way people could personalize them was through purchases of logos, ringtones, wallpapers and games, mostly through specialized portals and mobile carriers. Nostromo was a producer of such personalization premium branded content, after we invested in 2006 they acquired some big brands like Garfield, TNMT or Kung Fu Panda, started distribute them globally. In 2007 the iPhone came. In 2009 the market which according to analysts’ reports in 2006 was supposed to grow rapidly, was dead. Simple and quick as that.

What are a couple of things startups are most often not prepared for when they meet you, and start talking to your about their products and their future?

In general I must say that startups come to us better prepared than a couple of years back – which could mean that startup founders in Central Europe have more access to information and lessons learnt from other startups from around the world, and are becoming more aware of the whole startup investing thing. On the other hand there are always things to improve – in general I would say that the most common mistake would be insufficient understanding of competition and customers. Who is solving the same problem and how, and who should be buying/using the product, what exactly is the motivation, what is solving the problem now…

What kinds of things can really turn you off from a potential investment? How much does personality matter in the founders, or is it all about the business?

It is all about people! And there are tons of things that turn me off – crazy ambitions, lack of ambitions, inability to listen, lack of knowledge of the target market, laziness, and the list could go on…

Some people are scared of VCs. Are there any good reasons to be wary of dealing with many of them?

There is no rational reason to be scared of VCs, or at least no more than being scared of swimmers. Of course, you need to be aware that venture capital is not for everybody, and it could be uncomfortable for an entrepreneur who doesn’t have the ambition to grow rapidly or change the world, due to unaligned interests. So if you want to create a lifestyle business with organic growth generating steady income, don’t go to VCs. VCs just can be scary as they often provide very direct and brutal feedback, but again – mostly for the ones who don’t want to hear feedback.

What are some things founders are often preoccupied with, but which don’t matter as much as they think?

As cliché and banal this may sound, very often founders are in love with their product or offering, and they spend way too much time on brushing it and playing with it without having any feedback from customers. Then they release their polished product to the market and often realize that it doesn’t solve any problem and there are no customers who would want to pay for the product, or even use it at all – so they spent a lot of time and energy on a beautiful useless product. Just to be clear, we love founders who are passionate about the product – but the passion has to be about the problem–solving attributes of the product, not the product itself.

What’s the best pitch you’ve ever heard, and what made it so great?

Before I answer this, I would just like to remind that a great pitch doesn’t mean it’s a great company and vice versa – I’ve heard really bad pitches from founders who ended up being super successful and I saw an awesome pitch by an entrepreneur who failed badly. When you think about it, pitching is really very much like the sports in which judges make calls – impossible to measure, it is about subjective opinions and feelings – some people feel Sarka Pancochova should have won the olympic medal, judges thought otherwise… But the last pitch I’ve heard was actually from a team we decided to invest in – and it will be announced soon, so I won’t tell you the name. But it was a pitch which gives you goose bumps because you feel this is something potentially world changing. As my colleague Andrej says, that’s the feeling to be a VC for – BTW, I would highly recommend Andrej’s blog, it is great for startup founders who are considering coming to us for funding – it gives them a great recipe.

What are 5 things you want a company to have accomplished before you consider investing?b

Well, there’s pretty much just 1 thing to accomplish: convince us that we should invest. But seriously, we want the founders to convince us on the existence of a problem or pain in the market, show us big enough potential in solving that problem, explain us what the solution is, build a strong and committed team and ideally show us some initial traction proving their point and ability to execute. Not difficult, ay? 🙂

We got some push-back, even from locals, when we declared that Prague was the best new place to start a company and run a startup. How do you see Prague’s future as a cradle of innovation?

Prague is an awesome place, both to run a startup and to live in… 🙂 You can change the world no matter where you’re based. Although it is still the case that for some startups you should at least have access and exposure in places like Silicon Valley, but you can still base your startup anywhere else.

[ssba]